SubJeff on 5/8/2013 at 11:02
To be fair to them though Thief isn't the type of game that should be getting the same kind of wows as Deus Ex.
Deus Ex is sleek, futuristic sci-fi with lots of tech toys and cool design. The viral website had some great artificial limb designs, the trailers were pretty epic.
Thief isn't about that. It's subtle, subdued even. Their attempt to make it a bit more visual with the new suit and bow has been met with derision by many fans, here included. It's not an easy game to sell.
Thirith on 5/8/2013 at 11:47
To be honest, if I were the EM marketing department, I'd probably try to make this look as much like Dishonored as possible - more so than is perfectly accurate, most likely. While I understand some of the criticism (I'm probably on the same page as SE, without having quite as much of a stake in it), if Thief 4 turns out to tick the same boxes as Dishonored, I'll be relatively happy, since that game brought back what I enjoyed most about Thief more than, say, The Dark Mod. However, I understand that Dishonored 2 won't be enough for many fans, legitimately so, nor do I think at this point that they'll do as well as Dishonored at capturing what I'm hoping for.
T.F.7 on 5/8/2013 at 20:51
I see. In order to get as much customers as possible, EM is showing their back on us - The Real Thief Fans. They'll deliver a worse game just to attract as much idiots as possible. Pity.
CloudOJD on 11/8/2013 at 14:09
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
To be fair to them though Thief isn't the type of game that should be getting the same kind of wows as Deus Ex.
Deus Ex is sleek, futuristic sci-fi with lots of tech toys and cool design. The viral website had some great artificial limb designs, the trailers were pretty epic.
Thief isn't about that. It's subtle, subdued even. Their attempt to make it a bit more visual with the new suit and bow has been met with derision by many fans, here included. It's not an easy game to sell.
It actually
is easy to sell if they chose the right crowd to sell it to. But they didn't. Their fault.
SubJeff on 11/8/2013 at 14:14
I don't think that crowd is as big as you think it is. Unfortunately.
CloudOJD on 11/8/2013 at 15:38
That is true, I'm aware of that. However, Thief is not, and never was, a mainstream series. It's a type of series meant for a specific group of people. We all know how their attempts to make it more accessible are turning out.
SubJeff on 11/8/2013 at 19:15
Would you rather they made a hardcore Thief game that is a great Thief game but which loses them money?
MoroseTroll on 11/8/2013 at 19:57
A few ex-Thief professional game developers have told me that the development a Thief-like game would cost about $8..10 million; of course, with no FM/CG-video and advertising on conventions and media. Let's imagine that this game will be distributed via Steam: a single copy costs, say, $30; Gabe takes about $10; so every game's copy brings about $20 to its developers. $10 million / $20 = 0.5 million copies is needed to refund the development. Do you really think that a new Thief game or alike wouldn't achieve this?
Esme on 11/8/2013 at 23:30
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
Would you rather they made a hardcore Thief game that is a great Thief game but which loses them money?
EM could have produced a hardcore Thief game with significantly less investment within a couple of years of starting,
TDM pretty much did this exact thing with no investment and a very small dev team.
And as MoroseTroll pointed out it wouldn't have had to shift that many units to make a profit in that case.
However EM decided to try and turn Thief into a mainstream title that would appeal to what they describe as the modern gamer, which in my opinion was a mistake. They wasted who knows how long making real world game artifacts to see what they looked like. Deliberated over how the third person perspective should actually look before deciding the 3P would be minimal (in their opinion) and presumably binning a lot of the 3P work they'd already done. And a whole raft of other questionable decisions that moved ever further away from anything I'd call a Thief game and soaked up time and resources along the way.
Who knows, if they'd gone the hardcore route maybe the 'modern gamer' would have surprised them.
We'll never know because now they are stuck, they have to finish the development of the AAA title they've started making and hope it gets them their money back because they've invested too much to switch to the hardcore game I think they should have aimed for in the first place.
Goldmoon Dawn on 11/8/2013 at 23:39
*Very* well said, Esme. I could not have said it better myself.
